Dear Friends,
May is the month during which we celebrate the fifth anniversary of our virtual event series “Flight or Fight. stories of artists under repression.” You can now find about 150 artist videos on our YouTube channel @fritzaschersociety!
Throughout this month, we ask you to donate to the Fritz Ascher Society to enable us to continue this important virtual program, which brings artists to a global audience, who are not widely known because they were persecuted or murdered by the German Nazis.
We need to raise $10,000.00 to ensure the continuation of this program.
And I am happy to announce that every donation made this month will be matched dollar-for-dollar until we reach that amount, so please:
May is also Jewish American Heritage Month, and for us it is a lady’s month as well, as we participate with virtual events about two highly accomplished women, the photographer Trude Fleischmann and the painter Tamara de Lempicka.
The exhibition Survival and Intimations of Immortality at the Oregon Jewish Museum and Center for Holocaust Education in Portland, Oregon, features another lady, as well as her granddaughter: Holocaust survivor Alice Lok Cahana. This highly praised three-generational exhibition is on view until May 25.
We’ll start with the virtual events:
WEDNESDAY, May 7, 12:00PM EDT
Through the Lens of Trude Fleischmann (1895-1990)
Presentation by Carey Mack Weber, Fairfield (CT),
followed by a conversation with Barbara Rosenberg Loss
Introductory remarks by Stephanie Buhmann
Trude Fleischmann, Sandra and Barbara with Golden Heart Necklaces, 1951, gelatin silver print. Courtesy of Barbara Rosenberg Loss. © Trude Fleischmann
After opening her own studio in Vienna at the age of just 25, Trude Fleischmann (1895-1990) had great success there in the 1920s and 30s photographing artists, dancers, actors, and other key cultural figures of the era. When the Nazis invaded during the Anschluss in 1938, she fled first to London and then to New York. She opened a studio just behind Carnegie Hall on 56th Street, in 1940 and photographed many of the artists and intellectuals of the day, including Eleanor Roosevelt, Marian Anderson, and Albert Einstein.
Presentation by Carey Mack Weber, Curator and Director, Fairfield University Art Museum, followed by a conversation with Fleischmann’s cousin, Barbara Rosenberg Loss. Introductory remarks by Stephanie Buhmann, PhD, Head of Visual Arts, Architecture and Design at the Austrian Cultural Forum New York.
Carey Mack Weber is the Executive Director of the Fairfield University Art Museum and the curator of the current exhibition in the Museum’s Bellarmine Hall Galleries – Famous & Family: Through the Lens of Trude Fleischmann. She was integral to the creation of the Museum in 2010 and was named the Frank and Clara Meditz Executive Director in 2019. Carey also currently serves as the President of the Connecticut Art Trail, is the CT State Representative for the Association of Academic Museums and Galleries, sits on the Advisory Board of the Maguire Museum at St. Joseph’s University, and serves as a board member of the Connecticut League of Museums.
Barbara (Bobbie) Rosenberg Loss is the co-curator of Famous & Family: Through the Lens of Trude Fleischmann. She was greatly influenced by the artist, her cousin, who was an integral part of her family growing up. A former English teacher and reading consultant in the Bridgeport and Fairfield Public High Schools and at Norwalk Community College, she is the author of Say the Word, A Guide to Improving Word Recognition Skills. Bobbie often incorporated her own photography into her classrooms. Her interests generated numerous photo books, including Bridgeport, Beauty and Blight, A Tour of Our City through Photographs (2016) and Views from the Train (2020). She was a contributor and consultant to the Austrian TV Documentary: Trude Fleischmann In Nackter Gesellschaft (2019), directed by Michael Kreiner and Katherina Lochmann.
This event is part of the online series “Flight or Fight. stories of artists under repression.”
And we will hear about a female modern painter, who celebrated huge successes in the 1920s and 1930s, this time in Paris, and who was also able to flee persecution in Europe and continue her career in the US:
WEDNESDAY, May 21, 12:00PM ET ONLINE
Tamara de Lempicka: Modern Maverick
Presentation by Alison de Lima Greene, Houston (TX)
Tamara de Lempicka, Young Girl in Green (Young Girl with Gloves), c. 1931, oil on board, Centre Pompidou, purchase, 1932, inv. JP557P. © 2024 Tamara de Lempicka Estate, LLC / ADAGP, Paris / ARS, NY. Digital image © CNAC/MNAM, Dist. RMN- Grand Palais / Art Resource, NY
Capturing the glamour and vitality of 1920s postwar Paris and the cosmopolitan sheen of Hollywood celebrity, Tamara de Lempicka (1894–1980) infused her paintings with a brilliant sense of fashion, design, and the theatrical. The subject of the first retrospective devoted to her work in the United States, organized by the San Francisco Fine Arts Museums and currently on view at the Museum of Fine Arts, Houston, Lempicka’s singular contribution to the history of modernism is only now becoming widely known.
Join Alison de Lima Greene, MFAH curator, for an introduction to the remarkable arc of Lempicka’s career as she rose to the pinnacle of café society in 1920s and 1930s Paris, and her American odyssey after she fled Europe in 1939.
Alison de Lima Greene is the Isabel Brown Wilson Curator of Modern and Contemporary Art at the Museum of Fine Arts, Houston, where she has served on the curatorial staff since 1984. A member of the curatorial team responsible for the inaugural presentations in the MFAH’s new Nancy and Rich Kinder Building in 2020, her recent exhibitions include Philip Guston Now, organized in collaboration with the National Gallery of Art and the Museum of Fine Arts, Boston, and the Tate London.
Ms. Greene was a 2010 Fellow at the Center for Curatorial Leadership and has served as vice president and trustee of the Association of Art Museum Curators; she is currently on the advisory boards of the Frances Lehman Loeb Art Center at Vassar College and The Barnett Newman Foundation.
The event is part of the online series “Flight or Fight. stories of artists under repression.”
This is the last month of our exhibition Survival and Intimations of Immortality: The Art of Alice Lok Cahana, Rabbi Ronnie Cahana, and Kitra Cahana at the Oregon Jewish Museum and Center for Holocaust Education in Portland, Oregon, which is on view until May 25, 2025.
During this last month, there are fabulous programs planned:
- May 5, 7:00pm: Screening of THE LAST DAYS, an Oscar-winning documentary produced by Steven Spielberg, featuring Alice Lok Cahana, at Cinema 21, 616 NW 21st Ave, Portland, OR 97209
- May 10, 12:00pm: Public tour
- May 21, 11:15am: Public tour with the Cahana family
- May 22, 6:00pm: Within the Darkest Light: A Conversation with Michael Berenbaum and Rabbi Michael Cahana
You can register for all these in-person events here:
Survival and Intimations of Immortality: The Art of Alice Lok Cahana, Rabbi Ronnie Cahana is a unique and powerful exhibition at the Oregon Jewish Museum and Center for Holocaust Education, which explores the role of art and creativity, bringing the past into the present by focusing on three generations of artists from the same family. Alice Lok Cahana (1929-2017) was a Holocaust survivor who pledged she would become an artist if she survived the war.
The exhibition reveals how the tragedy of the Holocaust impacted multiple generations of a family and how each member transformed the destructive trauma of the Shoah into acts of intense creative accomplishment, taking their own path to provide a through-line to preserving the memories, culture, and identity of their shared family and the Jewish people.
If you don’t have the chance to visit the exhibition in Portland, don’t despair: this is just the beginning of the exhibition’s international travels.
In the meantime, I invite you to watch the recording of the virtual event, during which curator Ori Z Soltes and artists Ronnie Cahana and Kitra Cahana shared their insights about the work in the exhibition, how the show was made, and the impact it had, and shared more insight into the remarkable life and work of Holocaust survivor Alice Lok Cahana:
You can find the recordings of our other virtual April events here, to watch, re-watch and/or pass on to those who might be interested in them:
